While the OP doesn't appear to be breaking any forum rules, I am pretty sure this is just for advertising and / or search engine ranking, and not a sincere question.

It would be smart if, as with links in posts themselves, links in users' profiles had the rel="nofollow" tag to make it at least a little harder to game the system.

But, since we're on the topic, I thought this was a pretty funny episode of "The Splendid Table" recently, where her guest (Bill Waddington of TeaSource) acts as if no one had ever heard of hei cha before. I halfway wrote a comment about it, and decided to just not bother.

Oh yeah Will you got it Somehow I never paid attention to the little buttons under one's avatar

On the other hand, I think it's a good thing that hei cha is more and more sold in US (previously there were mainly a few English language web store located in China selling them). It will be interesting to see whether people would get into them.

I remember seeing the discussion of the radio cast on steepster. I listened to the first a couple of minutes of it. It doesn't actually sound as bad (or as arrogant) as the advertising line of the radio cast. I guess the radio people had to release a message of a "shocking new discovery" to catch audience, not that the speaker took it as something so new.

It's good to bring in new knowledge and upset the current knowledge system. But I do feel the talk had a tendency of underestimating the per-existing information system. I didn't read many English tea books, but remember at least The Story of Tea by Heiss & Heiss mentions yellow tea, which is not even acknowledged as a tea category by the talk. Yet the talk sounds like previous books carried wrong information to people. Besides, I don't think it's simply "wrong" to put hei cha and puerh in one category. It's just complicated

gingkoseto wrote:Besides, I don't think it's simply "wrong" to put hei cha and puerh in one category. It's just complicated

Exactly. How to categorize pu'er is really complicated, and even on Chinese language tea forums, there isn't an agreed on "right answer".

I think most people would argue that ripe pu'er is hei cha, but with raw pu'er, it gets a little dicier -- if young sheng isn't hei cha, at what point in the aging process (if any) does it become hei cha.

I understand not wanting to confuse with our idea of "black tea", but do you think "black tea" is a better translation than "dark tea"?

Oh I almost forgot I participated in this discussion a few years ago!

Is Robert LCG?I don't think black sounds all bad culturally. For example, there is the old Chinese saying that "if you want to look prettier than you are, then get dressed in black." Some Hunan hei cha company now makes a hei cha product called "black rose", which is supposed to sound sexy (possibly western influence on this)

I think "black tea" is the most exact literal translation for hei cha, because after all, dark is not the same as black. But it's not practical to call it "black tea", as the term is already taken. I guess hei cha would be an ok name as there is nothing hard to pronounce in it, at least no nasty letters like q and x But eventually the name used by the most people (or by the largest seller) will become the "official" name when more and more people use it.

Also I feel I don't have thorough understanding of English words. It sounds to me that black means the color black, while dark indicates an environment in which you have limited vision (like darkness), or a color that's not as intense as black (like dark skin). Is that what these words are supposed to indicate or just my mental reflections?